(A/N) Hey guys, time for another Phase One: Genesis update, going up a little early to make up for all the late updates last week, this one coming from the mind of our very own Warg! It will be a two-part chapter, as it was so long I didn't think you'd be able to take all that awesomeness at once! You all know what's coming up here, that's right, armour abilities. And it's going to be gooooood!
As before, we're still looking for writers for our Grifball fic, but doors will shut by the end of August, so get a move on. For those interested in RPing, our roleplaying forum is open to everyone, so if you're interested go on and check it out! We get a lot of traffic there, and it's a perfect place to start for people who are new to roleplaying, as well as those with experience!
Enjoy!
Chapter Seventy-Seven - Of Two Minds: First Blood
Agent Georgia
Written by WargishBoromirFan
Warning for Church-level cursing and spoilers to "First Blood."
"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it and I shall move the world." - Archimedes
"Agent Carolina, please report to the training room floor," F.I.L.S.S. called, although the top agent was already waiting at the doors, entering the gauntlet with the same ease and grace as she had on Georgia's first day. In some ways, this would be easier; nobody was due to fire at her for this session, at least.
"Start with just the chameleon circuit," the Director ordered, manipulating a switch on the new server. "F.I.L.S.S, if you would?" The previously plain white room began to pulse with colour like one of California's club lights, now a solid purple, now a mottled tan, now a mixed camo of greens and greys, now steel, now the colour of the sea under mottled shadow… And if Carolina's usual blueish-green aquamarine teal colour had been difficult for a man to put into words before, there just wasn't time to describe it before it changed, now. As fast as the environmental lightshow changed, her armour colour varied to keep up, matching pattern for pattern. "Let's be sure it works from all angles, now."
York let out a wolf whistle as Carolina turned around, and the upturned middle digit she shot him blended in as well as any other part of the armour against the rapidly changing background.
"Now hold that pattern through the next exercise," the Director called, and punched a few more commands into the server, and then F.I.L.S.S.'s serene tone filled the air.
"Basic speed trial with the server connection will begin in three… two…"
Carolina had always been fast. She could probably sprint the width of the training room in ten minutes, and it wasn't exactly the fishbowl it looked like from the observation deck down there. But this, even for Carolina, was flying. "Anybody get a radar on her?" North asked with a low whistle. "'Cause I've definitely been in speeding cars that went slower than that." South elbowed him, her gaze still locked on the window.
"Sixty kilometres an hour," the Counselor observed, marking it down on his data pad as Carolina backpedalled to a hard stop. If her black and steel-grey pattern had blurred at all, it appeared to be merely from speed, but she did tremble slightly as her hands made contact with the far wall and her feet finally came to a halt.
The salt-and-pepper goatee twitched as the Director filed this data away. "It will do for a first run. And when you are ready, Carolina, we will try something a little more engaging."
Out on the floor, the number one agent pulled herself together and into a salute. "Ready, sir!"
"Make your way through the obstacle course, at top speed. Be ready to change pattern on my mark." Once again the lighting in the training room went military cuttlefish disco, and the floor began erupting moving pillars as if it were escaping an earthquake in the depths of hell. Then the walls and ceiling started to move.
"Feel like I ought to have a background track for this, but I'm not sure I've got anything frantic enough," Cal muttered, his chin wedged between the glass and Mich's shoulder as they stared out at Carolina's progress.
She rocketed over one block of concrete smashing sideways, ducked beneath a plummeting pillar, and leaped a rising stalagmite, and turned at high velocity, changing her armour colour for every measured "Mark" piped over F.I.L.S.S.'s comm system. When the last pillar slid back into the ground, it took her a few steps to tame her momentum, but she was standing tall, and had ended with her original teal armour colour.
"Very good, Agent Carolina," the Counselor praised, mostly overriding the cheering coming from her fellow freelancers. While he remained one of the quieter observers, not even Penn could look on something like that and not enjoy himself, if only by imagining what he'd do with two enhancements. "While I wouldn't recommend using the speed unit outside of the server just yet, you certainly appear to have the basics of the two units down."
"Thank you, sir." Carolina saluted before she left the ring, clearing out for the rest of the Freelancers to test their skills.
"Agent Pennsylvania, you are scheduled next." The Counselor spoke just before F.I.L.S.S.'s call rang out over the intercom. The Director remained bent over the server as Penn left and Carolina returned, focused on getting it just right. Running into a wall at speeds associated with seat-belt and airbag-equipped motorized vehicles could certainly do some damage, but if the safeties on Penn's test failed, there'd probably be nothing left to find.
"How'd it feel down there? You looked amazing!" Massa asked, greeting her at the door to the classroom just before York. York had opened his mouth first, but no words had come out.
"Seems cliché to call it a rush," Carolina told her, appearing torn between collapsing into a seat and pacing off the adrenaline high as she passed through the knot of curious agents. Her eyes lingered on the abandoned chairs, but her legs kept her pace around the observation classroom. "But when you're hooked up to the server, everything just seems to slow down and make sense. You can process everything, like there's someone there to take care of it all and all you have to do is think of the command."
"Someone there?" Virginia repeated uncertainly.
"It's nothing I could really hear, but it just felt familiar, like someone supporting me, pushing me onwards… like when I was being watched over by my mother or dad, when I was really little - fuck, I'm rambling." Carolina put a hand to her depolarized visor to stop the outpour, putting on the brakes and dropping into a seat. "Don't read too much into it. The server helps."
"Hopefully it'll help Penn here, too," Florida said, turning to watch as the big Freelancer in blue prepared for his own testing. While each agent had gotten its own armour augmentation, Penn's stood out even among the rest. He hadn't been given two like the redhead at the top of the leaderboard, but Penn's teleportation unit, no matter how short-range, just dripped with possibility.
This could very well be the transport of the future - no need for ships or man-cannons or cars or armour, just where one wanted to be, one moved there. Where one didn't need to be, one phased out. Well, Georgia would always be a soft touch for certain old-fashioned methods, but this was just too exciting to ignore. His face was pressed into the glass as hard as it would go as Penn nodded to the man bent over the server.
"Two meters to your left, Agent Penn," the Director told him, the target location lighting up with a red circle. Penn activated his teleporter and faded from sight. Georgia flinched, but it was not because of the big man's disappearance. It was not even the countless immortal seconds that it took him to reappear on the circle. It was that scream.
Pennsylvania was a berserker; if he showed slightly more restraint than Alaska, Georgia, or Maine in a fight, it was only so that he could throw in more showmanship. This was a man who, when shot, had killed two men with his bare hands and crippled another before he was hauled away for surgery. Wyoming had said that he'd been all but laughing as he'd done so, blood streaming down his armour. In his match against Maine, the worst Georgia had heard Penn utter was a grunt of pain, like a normal man stubbing a toe in a doorjamb, followed by that roar of unstoppable fury. And Penn was screaming in pure agony.
It was almost a relief when it stopped as he disappeared, but it started right where it had left off as he came back into being on the target. That agonized cry only stopped for good as Pennsylvania ran out of breath, choking out a wounded moan as he stumbled within the circle. "Perhaps we should stop here, Director," the Counselor spoke mildly, cutting through the echoes of that horrible noise. "The server may need some fine-tuning."
Down on the training floor, Penn unsteadily examined his hands, tugging off his gauntlets as if unsure what he expected to find beneath. The Director looked up from the readouts to briefly lock gazes with his second-in-command before turning to the floor. "That will be enough for now, Agent Pennsylvania."
Penn didn't bother to retrieve his gloves. Maybe the transport of the future could wait a few more years.
"Agent York, you are up next." The man seated next to Carolina was hardly the only one to give the Director a sudden blank stare.
York caught himself, and attempted to shake it off with his usual smile, though his eyes remained a little too large and glassy. "Uh, are we sure everything's okay, there?"
Penn walked back into the classroom and tore off his helmet, gasping a lungful of air before shivering involuntarily, running his hands over his face and then pausing to stare at them again. "You look like you'd rather have my armour ability," York observed. There had been less cheering at Penn's entrance.
The Director's face, for instance, could turn melting sugar into frozen lemons. "You have a problem, Agent New York? It is time for your test."
"No, sir," York saluted, though he looked like he'd rather catch up with what had happened to Penn than go down there himself right now.
"Don't let me detain you." Those glasses looked solid blue from the reflection of the screen. York headed out of the classroom and down to the training room, helmet on tight. All well and good, until the giant turret rose from the floor.
Carolina cleared her throat. "Director," she said, putting just a little too much emphasis on the "d," a little too flat on the "i," like she'd considered calling him something else, "are you sure that this particular test is… scientifically objective?"
"Would you rather this experiment take place away from the dedicated command server and trained medical personnel? We must know the extents of all the enhancements, Agent Carolina." The Director emphasized her code name, his drawl so thick today that it made Georgia's native bluegrass twang sound positively nasal by comparison. Georgia had never pegged Leonard Church as a medical doctor, but you didn't get a PhD ignoring the scientific method, either. Agent Georgia, MSE, ought to know. But there were just times when objectivity just didn't lend itself to awesomeness, nor did safety, and this appeared to be one of those times, unfortunately or not for York.
"I really must protest this, Director," the Counselor spoke up, hardly looking any less rattled than the Freelancers, at least for him. "It does the project no good to put our own agents out of commission."
"Stand down, Counselor," the Director sighed. "It's all crowd-control shells. Mostly. I might have left a box or two of incendiary rounds down with the inventory, but F. .S. will be able to tell the difference, won't you, F.I.L.S.S?"
"Affirmative, Director." Both the A.I. and project leader were worryingly silent about what was to be done about that difference. Out on the floor, York had picked up Penn's abandoned gauntlets and positioned the bulletproof armour in strategic genetically important positions with a small whimper. Georgia was once again thankful for his own CQB helmet with less glass.
"Don't flinch, York. We don't want to skew the results." The Director had his attention on the testing floor as the turret spun into action. Most of the others looked away, eyes on the Director, each other, or Penn's helmet lying abandoned on the floor, for those who bothered to keep them open. Massa was biting her lip as she watched, and Penn was still staring into the spaces between particles. Nobody had bothered to ask if he was okay; it was kind of obvious. Florida offered him a chair, but the big man ignored it. Georgia found it easier to watch the barrels rotate and focus on trying to count rounds.
Damned nice gun, that one. She fired from six individual chambers leading to six individual barrels, ringed three times along their lengths with Teflon connectors, with an optional auto-loader cycling up from the man-size triple hinge-jointed base of the weapon. The turret itself could be swept around a horizontal radius separate from its base, or the whole thing could be raised, lowered, or moved around via the rings of rails holding it in place, the triple axis allowing the whole thing to slide around a globe like a fairground ride. The overall rate of fire wasn't precisely the six hundred sixty-six bullets a minute the first machine guns had been touted as possessing, but it was relatively slow for a modern automatic, making up the difference in larger calibre as those barrels spun on.
True to the Director's word, only a couple of rounds spat fire past ignition. When York finally dragged himself up from the floor, his armour was blackened, but mostly intact. Well, the downside of incendiaries was that they had next to no penetrating power, better for leaving a man running around in flames than putting him on the ground.
"Vitals are at sixty-one per cent and rising," Wyoming noted through his HUD. "Didn't kill him yet."
"Are we done, Director?" Carolina asked. She'd polarized her visor sometime between her last question and the five rounds rapid, green eyes hidden behind reflective glass.
The man addressed steepled his hands atop the new server, mouth twitching as he looked out over his handiwork on the training room floor. "For now, with him. There is much more else to be taken care of. Agent Virginia, you are up next."
The turret sank back into the floor, and Virginia let out a breath as she walked to the classroom door, her roommate and board leader shadowing her heels. "I believe I said Agent Virginia," the Director snapped without turning. "You will have your turn, Massachusetts."
"We're just going to help York off the field," Massa responded sweetly enough, raising a hand. "Trained medical personnel to better determine the enhancement's efficiency, right?"
"Agent Maine would better help you move him than Carolina," the Director shot back, but at least waved her through alongside Virginia. Carolina remained in the doorway, dropping her shoulders only long enough to turn to the big Freelancer in white and orange and jerk her head sideways in silent command. Maine silently glowered between her, Penn, the Director, and the Counselor, found his six-eleven death's head wasn't cutting it with any of them today, and trotted after the other ladies with a shrug at the upper heavens.
He returned shortly with Massa at his side and York draped over his shoulder. York sure didn't look good, but he at least raised his head when Maine walked through the door. "Nope, you did not want my armour ability today," he joked weakly as Maine set him down across a couple chairs at Massa's hovering directions.
"How you feeling, buddy? Did it work?" North asked, staying awkwardly just out of Carolina-glare range as Massa removed the scorched chest plate.
"I liked it better when my mom would just kiss my boo-boos to make 'em better. You up for it, fearless leader?" The limp Freelancer turned that puppy-dog stare on Carolina, and she patted somewhat awkwardly at his leg, unused to showing affection or unwilling to get in Massa and Maine's way.
"My mom used to tell me to rub some dirt on it and walk it off," she told him, almost covering for the Director's automatic response.
"Tetanus, Ali-" The bespectacled old man caught himself in the middle of a reflexive grumble and cleared his throat. "The enhancement already covers analgesia. Agent York will be fine."
The agent in question shot him a very painful look, though Georgia wasn't sure if that was more felt or being sent the Director's way. "Think I'll live, anyway." York pulled himself up to his elbows as Massa went to work on the back plate, leaving him in battered under-armour above the waist. "How's Penn?"
South waved her hand in front of the impassive face with its thousand-yard stare. "I think we broke him."
Maine shook his head. "Killed."
"What do you mean? Poor ol' Penn's had a rough go of it, but he's fit as ever was. He'll be all right once he's had some thinking time to get it all straight in that head," Florida attempted to reassured them, clapping a hand on the wide blue shoulder. Penn stumbled a step forward under the smaller Freelancer's attempt at solidarity, but made no other response.
"Check the vital records," Maine told him, propping York up for Massa and Carolina to examine, though York looked more in control of himself than Penn did.
"They flashed out for a tick, but only because he was out of view," Massa acknowledged. Maine stuck out his chin persistently, and she bent to pick up the fallen blue Mark VI helmet, accessing the last hour's vital information. "Oh dear lord…"
"Sure it's not just a hardware problem?" Georgia asked. He wasn't sure what exactly had put that expression on Massachusetts's face, but diagnostics he could handle, as long as it was just a matter of machinery.
"If by 'hardware,' you mean every cell in his body, then yes, the hardware crashed and rebooted itself." Hardware didn't reboot like software, but this seemed a bad time to get into semantics. It did sometimes crash.
"Penn? Pennsylvania? Anybody know his original name?" Cal muttered to the rest, but Penn was hardly the type to break that sort of protocol, when it had served him just as well up until now. "You still in there, dude? 'Cause we may still need you to pull a movie Rambo manoeuvre; nobody wants you to end up like Rambo in the book."
"There was a book?" South asked.
"Man, you guys had a deprived childhood," Cal said to himself as he continued around the catatonic giant. "Well, I guess Penn gets to start over from scratch, so we can be sure he's not ignorant of the classics. Happy new birthday, big guy."
If the laws of comedic timing had been enforced, now would have been a perfect time for Penn to mutter "son of a bitch," ream California out, or at least resume that soul-curdling scream. He just stood there, and reluctantly, most of the rest turned back to Virginia out on the floor or York on the chairs. At least York seemed to be on the mend, beat up, but more in a "just pissed off South during downtime" way rather than "just used for the Director's machine gun target practice."
Virginia's test, thank goodness, did not require her to go under fire with no way to fight back. She was going to have more trouble without her gun, but the sim troopers released into the ring after her couldn't see her even if she snuck into close-quarters range. Whereas Carolina's armour had merely blended in with the background, allowing her to mimic the coloration of anything she chose, Virginia's armour ability basically left her invisible, bending ninety per cent of the light around her to leave only a slight warp in the seen world to locate her presence. Georgia himself wouldn't have spotted her on his own, but Sota had been keeping a sharp eye on her since she had entered the facility, pointing out the ripple in the air as she snuck up on another wildly firing trooper and dropped him from behind.
"Please tell me her vitals look okay," Massa murmured hopefully to the tall, lanky agent in white after pronouncing York as good as he ever would be.
The Director's eyebrows cocked in smug reproof, but Carolina remained hovering over York and the most the Counselor offered was "Agent Virginia appears healthy and in control of her enhancement."
Virginia was certainly in control of the floor, ghosting from one trooper to the next like some horror film phantom. The remaining sim troopers had circled up, trigger fingers itching at every sound. "Al would be proud as punch to see her use that manoeuvre," Florida spoke up, still standing next to Penn as they watched.
Georgia wondered if their missing agent would have been able to see it any better than Penn if he were here. For a given value of "seeing," anyway. There was a noise on one side of the arena, then the other, a quiver in the air halfway between them, and the cornered sim troop went wild at it.
Then Virginia was on top of them. She dropped the cloak as she landed on one trooper feet to the head and struck out at two more, taking all three down before the fourth could do much more than turn around to find dark green armour where there had previously been his grey-armoured compatriots. He raised his pistol, elbows tight to his chest, and Virginia pulled back her right arm with casual deliberation. She disappeared from view just as her fist made contact with the trooper's skull. "You dropped your cloaking enhancement, Agent Virginia," the Counselor observed. "Was there a problem?"
"It's a bitch to see through the regular spectrum when it's on." The female Freelancer in dark green shimmered back into view in the middle of her moaning adversaries. Well, maybe in fact these guys hadn't stood any better of a chance than York, but at least they'd been given guns. And it was Virginia in there, not Penn or Cal and Sota in a particularly bad temper. Georgia had never seen her kill anyone barehanded. "Sir," she added belatedly. "Easier to stick the landing if I know where to hit."
"We shall have to work on that, agent." The Director typed in a few notes to the server before F.I.L.S.S. called Wyoming forth.
"Are we continuing the process of everyone who comes back upstairs strips off more than the last test subject?" Cal asked as Virginia made her way through the door to her roommate's celebratory hug. "Because while I'd approve of it this round, I vote we skip the next one and the next… four, five after him and dear god nobody wants to see Georgia's grease-monkey ass, but then," he slapped Minnesota on the shoulder and offered a cocky grin. "Ladies."
The nearest lady in question hit him in the stomach. "Oh, fuck you," South grumbled from her seat in the back, equidistant between her brother and Florida. "Though Mich might not take care of that if you keep that up. I'd rather see Georgia's," she muttered just loud enough to carry. Cal looked wounded, if unrepentant, under Michigan's flinty glare, the Director's goatee began twitching downward and inward again, and the Counselor cleared his throat in an effort to restrain the same eye-roll that Massa and Virginia had shared, but Georgia couldn't help but float just a little at the backhand.
"Is it working?" Wyoming called from the floor. Wait, when did have time to get all the way down there? He was standing in the middle of the training room floor, and surely Georgia hadn't been distracted that long since the Brit had walked by Virginia and out of the classroom.
"Try it again, set for a few minutes later." The Director, at least, didn't appear to think too much of Wyoming's speed.
"Righto." Wyoming snapped off a salute, and then momentarily disappeared, before walking in from the training room door. Georgia glanced back at the still unmoving Penn and flinched.
"Whenever you're ready, sir," Wyoming called up. All right, at least he didn't sound scarred for life.
"I want you to try -" The Director cut off as three more Mark VI armoured figures appeared, two in the same white as Wyoming and a third in cobalt blue.
"Oh, son of a bitch," the guy in blue muttered, aiming his sniper rifle just to the left of Wyoming's kneecap.
"Try that again, please," the Director said, clearing his throat.
"Whoops." The voice sounded like the man in blue out on the floor, but possessed a tinny echo to it, appearing to originate more from the new server than any intercom speakers.
"You take backward, I'll take forward," the man in white on Wyoming's left said, sounding as similar to their moustachioed sniper as they looked in that armour.
"Then once more?" Wyoming appeared to have discovered novel ways of talking to himself that made the people around him question their sanity.
"You'll figure it out." The one on the furthest left sidestepped the dust from the blue sniper's missed close-range shot. "Remind me to shoot this one later."
The other three figures disappeared as suddenly as they'd come, leaving one Wyoming from the centre, looking rather nonplussed. "Your armour advancement lets you jump through a very brief period in time, forwards or backwards," the Director said. "Currently." The Director ran a hand over the server's monitor with speculative care. "I want you to try a few minutes into the past, for now."
"Yes, sir." This time, Wyoming disappeared completely, only to reappear in more or less the same spot a breath later. "Well, that was just bloody odd," he summarized.
"I think we need to apply some more processor power to that one," the Director said.
"I would not recommend experimenting with this enhancement outside of the testing facility," the Counselor spoke, but his eyes weren't focused on the man down on the floor.
"Too right," Wyoming agreed as he headed up the stairs, but the Director didn't seem to notice South's call until she'd already made her way down.
When he finally shook himself off, his face betrayed no sign of what had been occupying him about Wyoming's test, but his accent seemed slightly lighter as he called one more out into the ring. It was a trained Midwestern cadence rather than a native one, but an affectation with years of practice behind it. "North Dakota, why don't you head on down as well? Your armour enhancements are meant to work in tandem." Both Carolina and Ark looked up at the voice, Carolina even dropping the polarization.
"Yes, sir," North said, rising without any visible sign of discontent or distress about his early assignment. "Wish us luck, guys," he added anyway. South did not appear quite so sanguine about her brother butting in on her chance to show off, but in Georgia's experience, elder brothers were known to do that, nearly as often as a younger sib might rain on one's parade. A man learned to cope with it, and then people accused him of "middle child syndrome." No wonder South fought her brother near as much as anyone else.
She was quicker with her bubble shield than he was, the two beehive-patterned barriers popping up with a white-gold tinge that the GT alumnus in Georgia had to admire. South started to charge at North without even being directed, but her shield did not move with her. South managed about a step and a half before the barrier flickered, and it was completely down by the time her shoulder hit the edge of her brother's.
"That's going to suck out in the field," the woman in purple armour muttered, tapping at North's still-solid tiles with a fist.
"They aren't ready to be used without the server, yet," the Counselor reminded her. "Firing anything within them… is not recommended."
North dropped his own shield and reached for his twin. "But come see what we can do with 'em." When he raised the shield once more, it covered South, as well.
South activated hers, first simply within North's to offer a double layer of protection, and then the inner bubble began to waver. At first Georgia was afraid that it had gotten out of her control, but South grabbed her twin's hand and pushed the initially shrinking barrier outwards. There was a crunching electrical feedback not unlike one amp dropped onto another from a fifth floor dorm as the two hard-light shields came into contact with one another, but as South's continued outwards, North's went with hers, enveloping half the training area.
The spent shells from Virginia's round clattered as the expanding shield forced them to the edges of the arena, and one or two of the rising pillars that had come loose at their bases from repeated incidents of Maine rattled beneath. In another blink, the shell had dropped again, but the Dakotas hadn't finished yet, shields flickering and moving as one ran to the edge of the other's barrier before yelling "switch!" and taking over, turning the unmovable fizzle South had complained of into a slow-building battering ram that hardly flickered more than Virginia's cloaking device. They might not be able to fire while under that bubble of hard light, but they might not have to.
"Good," the Director purred from his post on the server. "Very good."
"Now that was pretty awesome," Georgia agreed, pulling himself away from the window long enough to find his roommate before Arkansas's showing. Ark had been very quiet throughout the proceedings, keeping his mouth shut when Penn broke apart on the floor and when Virginia emerged from the shadows. "You think you can come up with something to top it?"
Ark just polarized his visor. "I'll find some way to make it shine," he said before heading out the door.
